Based on one of Edward St Aubyn's sequence of novels about the dysfunctional upper-middle-class Melrose family (co-scripted by St Aubyn and a first-time feature director hitherto known for his TV arts documentaries), this superior Downton and inferior Brideshead fiction centres on a British family and their offspring. In a chilly way they're trying to be honest about their grotesque mother while losing their fortune and hanging on to their property in Provence.

Everyone is weak and self-deceiving, except perhaps for the articulate eight-year-old Robert, who shares the smart third-person voiceover commentary with his drunken father and sad mother. They in turn cope with a demented grandmother (who's about to hand over the family's French chateau to a new-age, tree-hugging charlatan) and a boozy, neglectful mother. There are a few achingly bad moments that unnecessarily point up the crudity of vacuous British expatriates, but this is generally a film that knows its foreign milieu without being sneeringly knowing.